michael manning

One trend we identified at NADA was the ubiquity of paintings (noun) with a deliberate absence of painting (verb). Perhaps reactionary to provisional painting—and all its polarizing discourse on authorship, ego, and craft—there was nary an identifiable brushstroke on many of the fair’s plentiful canvases. Which isn’t to say that the work didn’t look painterly: paintings are an easy thing to bring to a fair and sell, but it seemed like no one wanted to paint. What we ended up with is a sampling of strategies to mitigate, or negate entirely, the apparent hand of the artist from the process of mark-making.

How successful was tonight’s Paddles ON! sale of digital art in London? On its face pretty good. Phillips sale totaled £83,500 ($113,636.83), exceeding their high estimate for the sale at £67,150 ($91,392.43). Dig a little deeper, though, and the results of the auction as a whole, which included 22 lots, suggest a still developing market: Five lots went unsold and four sold for under their estimates. Two unremarkable abstract panels that sold for as much as five times their estimate boosted the evenings sale numbers. Michael Staniak’s IMG_885, a monochrome painting made of casting compound and acrylic on board, brought in the most; it sold for £25,000, £20,250 over its £4,750 estimate. Trailing Staniak came Michael Manning’s Chinese Broccolini Torta, a pastel digital print on canvas which sold for £15,000, £10,000 over its £5,000 estimate.

Looks like Paddles ON! London, is on its way to replicating the strides made during last year’s much-discussed net-art auction, the first at a major auction house. Last fall, the auction held in New York at Phillips totalled $90,600 on the sale of 16 pieces out of 20 lots. People widely lauded the auction as a success—a GIF sold for $1,300 and the excitement from the live auction crowd was palpable—but financially, the case for Paddles ON! achievements aren’t clear cut. Nine of the works sold for less than their estimated bids, and four of those were bought in by the auction house.

Anyone else notice that Rhizome’s four-piece Paddle8 auction has already raised over $35,000? The auction supports their Seven on Seven Conference, for which they seem to have so shortage of support. That’s in no small part due to Petra Cortright’s “krakow_1.psd”, a digital painting on aluminum estimated at $3,500. The top bid for that painting is currently at $17,500 after 29 bids. The auction still has two days left.

I’m getting tired of seeing listings for dude-dominated digital art shows. Just to count what I’ve seen in the last month: The USB Show, at Paris’s Le Point Éphémère two weeks ago, invited one woman artist to participate out of 21; Astral Projection Abduction Fantasy, which ran from February 23rd to March 23rd in Dublin, included three women out of 29 artists; and the April 12th BYOB show, in Milan, only included 9 women out of 42 invited artists. These shows might as well be Lilith Fair, though, relative to the worst recent offender, Dotcom, a show organized by the anonymous collective BSNP at the Centre d’Art Bastille in France. That group show runs through June 10th and includes no women at all.

As is our annual tradition, I’ve asked people I know and respect to contribute their single favorite link for the year. No themes. No grand explanations. Just one link, and one sentence describing why they liked it. For the first time ever, this year I received no dupe links. The web is a much larger place than it used to be.

Who wants to see some art? Marlborough’s POWHIDA travels for a lap dance at Ramis Barquet, Karen Rosenberg almost recommends MoMA’s Talk to Me, and for those who wish to stay home, Street Show at Eyebeam can now be downloaded.